3D tech news, graphics programming, pixel hacking and demoscene

Tag: Interviews

ComputerAndVideoGames.com has published an interview of John Carmack about Quake Live. Quake Live is the online version of Quake 3 Arena and allows to quickly set up and play Quake 3 without the pain of downloading Q3A and the latest patches, connecting to servers and find other gamers.

Q: So is Quake Live the next step for PC gaming?
A: I don’t think this is the future of PC gaming, though it’s certainly an aspect of it. PC developers need to start considering the PC as a unique platform rather than a gaming machine that happens to be in your den rather than your living room.
The traditional big-budget, media-rich, single-player type games like we used to make at id Software through to Doom 3, all that really has to be done cross-platform on the consoles now, to basically cover the development expenses for something like that. But the PC still has huge success stories, with things like The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft, which have been bigger successes than any console game has ever been, or possibly ever could be in the near future. At the end of the day, you have to look at the PC as a platform with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Question: There’s some points we have found that 3DMark lacks, for example, OpenGL benchmark, Sound Card features test, special test for mouse and keyboard (this will be great for hard-core FPS fans )
Answer: ID and the OpenGL committee already make a great benchmark for OpenGL, Quake and Viewperf. The others are covered by internal tests at manufacturers.
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Question: Why named “Vantage”?
Answer: As a benchmark, we have a unique Vantage point from which to view the competition. Also, I wanted a V to go with Vista.

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creative force behind one of the most widely used and successful programming languages — C++ — is featured in an in-depth 8 page interview where he reveals everything programmers and software engineers should know about C++; its history, what it was intended to do, where it is at now, and of course what all good code-writers should think about when using the language he created.

The console is now a baseline. If you look at Gears of War or Assassin’s Creed, they came out on console and they were great experiences – but the PC versions had additional aspects to them that also made them attractive, whether you owned the console version or not. The PC version was better. That’s something that people need to get their heads around – the console is a baseline, the PC is going to be an improved version. That’s an exciting future, and that’s why I don’t see anything threatening about console at all.

Historically, id Software has been a PC gaming company, with consoles a secondary business that happened later. And even though the PC doesn’t get the focus that it used to, in many ways our hearts are still there, and we’d like to do things where the PC is the appropriate platform.
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But in terms of first-person shooters, if you look at something like Crysis and say that’s the height of what the PC market can manage, I don’t think that’s necessarily that exciting of a direction for the PC to be going in the future. With Quake Live, we hope that there’s an opportunity for people who’ve never played shooters to give this a try, and with that, the potential of actually growing the PC gaming market.

Here is an interview with David Makin, Palit Multimedia’s Consumer Marketing Manager. The idea was to get a better idea of Palit, the hitherto little known manufacturer of graphics cards.

They may not be as well-known as ASUS or Gigabyte but they are certainly more than just another manufacturer of reference-design graphics cards. We also wanted to know what they are doing to put their products ahead of their competitors and of course, their plans for the future.

Palit has been building graphics cards since 1988. Palit is well-known in China and somewhat in the EU (European Union) but didn’t start selling cards in the Americas until the end of last year.
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Palit makes every attempt to build cards to our own design rather than simply turning out cookie cutter clones of the GPU manufacturer-provided reference design. This makes a really big difference to end users because we do things better than the reference design.
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Is the GeForce 9800 GX2 the fastest single card on the planet? Sure. Are there people out there that are interested in that and do we want to support them? Of course. But there are VERY few of these cards being purchased right now (in our opinion) so we prefer to focus on products that people actually want to buy. Part of that reasoning is just business but it goes beyond that too.
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Who is S3? Joking! I don’t think they have a viable mainstream part just yet and are still playing in the embedded side of the house. If you’re an ODM or smaller motherboard partner I think it would be easier to work with them instead of the larger guys since neither AMD nor NVIDIA will have time to dedicate engineering resources to support you.